Does anyone else have any horror stories about their skids trying to ruin their Valentine’s Days or getting creepily jealous of them over a romantic holiday?  Here are mine:

Our first Valentine’s Day together, my partner bought me a beautiful bouquet of flowers and had them delivered to our house.  I was extremely touched by it because it was all of my favorite, odd flowers in a lovely vase in all of my favorite colors, it was the first time I’d ever had someone deliver flowers to me, and it came with a beautiful note that he had written.  His daughter was 15 at the time and one of her favorite things to do to me was to pretend to be on her phone whenever she walked by me, loudly talking and saying rude things about me or things that she thought would upset me.  She came into the house after school, holding a huge bunch of flowers and loudly exclaiming to her phone, “My dad had flowers delivered to me for Valentine’s Day.  I’m his #1 girl.  Isn’t that so-“ and when she rounded the corner and saw me in the kitchen with my flowers, she stopped dead, dropped her phone to her side, and stormed into her room.  You could hear her screaming nonsense and throwing stuff and a loud shattering.  Her father had bought her a beautiful, huge bouquet of flowers in a glass vase and delivered it to her school with a note saying, “Hope this makes you smile today. Love, dad.”  When she realized that he had also gotten me flowers, she went right into her bedroom and shattered hers on the floor.  She made her father clean up the mess of water, glass, and wilted flowers when he got home later, and told him that our cat had gone into her room and knocked it over.

Then there’s the year that she decided that her father should buy her mother (his ex-wife who left him for another man) a $300 bouquet of roses and have them delivered to her mother’s work.  He said no, of course, and that he was not buying anything for his ex-wife ever again.  So then she found an $80 bouquet of roses from another company.  He again told her no, adding, “I don’t understand what you don’t get about me not buying a Valentine’s Day present for my ex.  If you wanted to get your mother something for Valentine’s Day, you should have saved up some money and ordered it.  You’re lucky that I even buy YOU anything, because the only person I HAVE to buy anything for is Val.  Val is my romantic partner.  It’s a romantic holiday.”  She pouted for the next several days before and after the holiday, giving her dad the silent treatment and slamming everything open and closed and being an ass.  It was, of course, my fault that “she couldn’t get her mom anything.”  My partner actually didn’t buy his daughter a gift this year and told her, days after when she finally spoke to him to complain about it, that he did not think that her behavior warranted any sort of present.  It has never warranted a present, but I digress.

The year my partner bought her a live orchid and she insisted that he dump out the vine that I’d been babying so that she could plant the orchid in its pot and “have the orchid forever, even after Valentine’s Day.”  And she did not want a new pot or any empty pot we had in the shed or garage.  She wanted the container that I had a living thing in already or nothing else.  I told my partner no and he seemed genuinely puzzled by my refusal.  It wound up being a non-issue, however, because she killed the poor orchid (never gave it any sunlight or water) within a few days and dumped the whole mess into our kitchen trash.

And finally, the year we spent thousands of dollars to go to Miami for a couple days to get away from her after I told my partner that I couldn’t stand another Valentine’s Day dealing with her crap.  His daughter (then 18) called him several times a day, every day that we were gone, in hysterics, over and over (and this was not the first time that she had been left home alone, and she loved being home alone every other time that we had left).  She never called him this much before OR after the trip.  She was clearly just trying to ruin our trip.  It basically worked, too, because I was aggravated the entire time from having to listen to her voice every hour and being given no chance to calm down.  At one point she called to tell her dad that she got t-boned in a parking lot and almost died and her car was totaled and then the guy just drove away and it was so very scary and traumatic for her.  He was telling her to get the camera footage from the place and that he knew they had cameras in the front where she claimed this all happened and all of this other crap and it took up hours of our time.  We were literally on a boat off of Miami, trying to watch a romantic sunset, and I sat there listening to him talking to her on the phone while she was clearly pulling lies out of her ass.  When we got home, her car was perfectly fine (not a single scratch or dent ANYWHERE) and she didn’t bother to get any camera footage (because clearly an accident never actually happened). 

I have really high hopes for this Valentine’s Day because I shouldn’t have to see her or hear her at all...